This week we met the first Mac with ARM chips developed by Apple itself, the so-called M1. Among the initial drawbacks of these processors is the fact that developers will have to adapt their applications to be compatible. Well, Microsoft has already done its homework on this and is going to start offering support for these teams.
Microsoft Word, Excel, and More on New Macs
If you already reserved or are planning to buy one of the new Mac mini, MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, you should know that you will be able to use the Microsoft Office 2019 package almost from the beginning with full compatibility with the new chip. The developers have already launched a universal beta with which, among other things, full compatibility with this new hardware is added.
This information is important because the suite of office applications that includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and company is one of the most popular in the world. They would have achieved all this thanks to Rosseta 2, a software that acts as a code translator to make the transition from programs focused on Intel chips to the new Apple M1s easier. Of course, at the moment this is a beta and specific release dates are not known to the public, although it is not expected that it will take too long to occur in order to provide the best possible support to the first users of Apple Silicon.
In fact, one of the warnings that Microsoft throws is that the start of the applications will be a little slower , with a delay of approximately 20 seconds. This is due to the aforementioned code translation. However, they will be fully functional after this process and, luckily, in future versions this ‘lag’ will be considerably improved.
Hundreds of developers are already prepared
Apple and experts in the field foresee that the transition period from applications to ARM will take place in more or less 2 years counting from this 2020. Already at the conclusion of WWDC 2020, developers began to offer an equipped Mac mini with an A12Z Bionic processor as a “transition kit”. All this with the firm objective of testing the applications on the new chips that Mac already have.
It is fully understandable that initially there are some applications that still do not run well with the Apple Silicon and even that are not available. However, Apple already announced at the event last Tuesday that there are many developers who have already adapted their programs for the M1 chip. Therefore the forecast is that from the beginning the user can enjoy hundreds of applications with better performance than that obtained by Intel chips.
